The Pursuit of Poses: A Shift in Perspective

A young Vicky in love with arm balances.

When I first began my yoga practice, I was both fascinated and captivated by the postures. Many of the yoga books attributed miraculous healing benefits and outcomes to each pose. However, as my journey into yoga evolved I started to realise that striving for ever advanced poses can be fraught with frustration.

The body waxes and wanes, your practice goes through peaks and troughs. Some days a pose is readily available, and some days a pose you used to be able to do mysteriously disappears from your repertoire. To base your sense of satisfaction and achievement on the relative ease (or not) with which you could attain these outward forms was like chasing a mirage.

As a teacher I witnessed how seductive the pursuit of poses could be and in many ways, as I reflect back on my earlier teaching years, I perhaps inadvertently encouraged it. I taught many classes that were all geared towards preparing you for some sort of ‘peak pose’ – usually an intermediate/advanced level arm balance or deep backbend. I tried to instill a message of finding joy in the journey but I do sometimes wonder if the message got lost along the way, that students felt an unconscious pressure to ‘get somewhere’ in their practice.

At this point, I want to say that I do believe in exploring, challenging and having fun with testing our physical and mental boundaries, whether that be through exploring a difficult yoga posture, training for a marathon or practicing cartwheels in your garden. My concern is that we don’t mistake the reward for the pose rather we recognise that the real pleasure and growth lies in the journey, the many pathways and detours we make towards it.

“Yoga is not about touching your toes, but about what you learn on the way down there.” ~ Judith Hanson Lasater

This quote speaks to the understanding that the poses are just tools, vehicles if you like for helping to light up and bring awareness to different experiences on all levels – physical, mental, energetic and even emotional. What does the pose teach us about ourselves and our habits and tendencies? What does this pose have to offer us in terms of getting us to know ourselves better?

In truth, the process of learning to do something wonderful and crazy in your body (such as going upside-down, or balancing on one leg) is actually way more interesting and fun than the actual ‘doing’ of the pose. Even if we get a glimpse of satisfaction and achievement when we finally nail that handstand, human nature says that once we’ve learnt how to do something we quickly get bored and look to the next thing. This is not bad – constantly looking forwards is how we grow and evolve – it can just get a bit disheartening if you’re not aware of what’s happening.

A lot of my students tell me they want to learn the right way to do a pose – the correct technique. I always struggle with how to let them down gently. There is no right way. There is no neat list of cues that we can happily fit into a box called Downward-Facing Dog (DWD). This can be an inconvenient and uncomfortable realisation for those of us who like to have all the answers (basically me). In truth there are a million and one ways to do DWD depending on your skeletal structure and your intentions behind why you’re doing the pose in the first place. This lack of clarity around alignment can be confusing and frustrating for new students – they don’t want to get it wrong, they don’t want to get injured. And yet this is even further evidence to me that the way yoga is often taught may be missing the whole point entirely.

Downward-Facing Dog – annoyingly there is no one ‘right’ way to do this pose!

I humbly suggest that as teachers we need to empower our students to believe that they have the intuitive wisdom to align themselves in a way that feels integrated, strong and whole. This ability to feel into our bodies and discern and make sense of what we’re feeling and sensing can be a long and sometimes difficult process. In our analytical, logical, cerebrally-centered world many of us have learnt to ignore and shut down the messages of the body and yet what is yoga, if not the art and science of developing of getting to know ourselves better? This developing of self-awareness may in fact be the very best thing we can do for our health and well-being.

In my private sessions I am learning to be a little less prescriptive in my cueing (it is still work in progress). Rather than saying ‘Put your foot here, turn your shoulder this way – I invite students to try things, to see what gives them the greatest sense of space, strength and stability. “What would it feel like to widen your feet?” “How can you place your arm to give you the greatest sense of opening in your shoulder?”

Rather than there being a wrong or a right way to do a pose – how about exploring many ways of doing something and finding the one that gives you the greatest sense of ease, whole body integration and strength?

Rather than the yoga teacher now being the “guru” or expert who supposedly knows all the answers, the teacher serves as a guide, asking questions along the way, helping the student to find their own answers.

Teaching in this way invites the student to see the practice as an internal experience, and a practice of self-enquiry, it creates an environment of playfulness and curiosity and ultimately reminds the student that they are the true authority on their body, not their yoga teacher, their physio or their massage therapist.

This type of learning comes from an inwardly directed force, rather than an externally directed dictate and it opens us to the realisation that there is no end goal, just this moment, this breath, this movement and the next time you step onto the mat it will all be different.